RogerBW's Blog

2011, dir. Steven Soderbergh, Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon: IMDb / allmovie

A contagious disease spreads across the planet; civilisation starts to fall apart.

The film didn't do very well at cinemas: $22m opening weekend, $135m lifetime worldwide, on a $60m production budget. I suspect that may be because it was thoroughly mis-marketed; it was pitched as an kinetic action film, whereas it's much closer to a slow-burning drama.

Because the disease takes days to incubate, it's already all over the world before anyone has the slightest idea there's a problem. (This is a bit inconsistent; the first patient is infected on day one, coughing on day two, dead on day four, but quoted incubation times vary quite a bit from that.) Isolation is essentially pointless by the time anyone does anything about it, though people try it all the same.

The film feels fairly evenly split between the researchers working against the disease and various outsiders, mostly the widower of the first person we see infected. I find the former material rather more interesting, but I can see the reason for the rest.

It's a very "big" film: lots of name actors, lots of important characters spread across the various groups of people most affected by the disease. Perhaps rather too many characters, since none of the individual personal plots get anything like the development they could really use. What's worse, the excellent Marion Cotillard is unfortunately sidelined (and absent from the screen) for much of the middle of the film in spite of her top billing; I'd much rather have seen her in Jennifer Ehle's role as the scientist who does eventually develop a vaccine.

I did like to see the always-recognisable Enrico Colantoni, whom I first encountered in the excellent Flashpoint TV series, in a small part as a twitchy Homeland Security agent. The fellow just lights up a screen. A surprisingly unglamorous Kate Winslet takes an early medical role, and does a decent job of it. Meanwhile Jude Law has a thankless task as the irresponsible blogger who starts false rumours of a cure, and thereby indirectly causes much of the rioting and looting that occur in the later days. It's a shame we don't get any sort of resolution to his story, making it thoroughly pointless in the end; he's clearly learned nothing from his experiences, and this section could easily have been excised to give more time to the interesting stories. (Reminds me a bit of the similar part in The Core.)

The film is relatively free of the usual Soderbergh arty touches, though tricks with colour and film style get heavily used, and a sequence involving the viewing of casino security footage is clearly meant to make us think it's terribly clever (though it works reasonably well anyway). The postscript, a flashback to the initial infection, is the only bit that really breaks the overall visual mood.

There are really two main ideas here: how vulnerable we are to contagion (lots of ominous shots of doorknobs, shared glasses, and so on) and how much effort is needed to confront the problem. The former is more emotional; the latter is more effective. This is the feel that the board game Pandemic ought to have. If only it did have that feel, I'd play it a lot more.

Now wash your hands.